Name: Fortablb Lemonads
Ingredients: 4 large lemons; 1 pound white sugar; Grated lemon rinds; Water

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fortablb Lemonads

Ingredients

4 large lemons
1 pound white sugar
Grated lemon rinds
Water

Directions

Strain the juice from the lemons.
Mix the lemon juice with the white sugar in a jar, adding grated lemon rinds.
Preserve the mixture in a closed jar or large-mouthed bottles.
Use 1 tablespoon of the mixture for each tumbler of water.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lemon juice: Supplies the sour, acidic flavour that defines the drink.
White sugar: Sweetens the tart juice and helps keep the concentrate stable in storage.
Lemon rinds: Adds aromatic oils from the peel for extra lemon fragrance.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.